Microsoft Word Viewer

~ the eulogy ~

Word Viewer's life runs almost exactly alongside my own time online and I never once installed it. That is not a complaint about the product. It is what happens to a free reader in a country where the machines you actually sat at already had the full thing on them, including every machine in the internet cafes I used between 2002 and 2005.

The first build was Word Viewer 6.0, 16-bit, matched to Word 6.0. Microsoft never put a public launch date on it, which is itself a sign of what the product was, a utility that appeared next to a download link rather than a thing with a launch. Word Viewer 7.0 and 7.1 followed for Word 95 and were 32-bit. Version 7.1 had an unpleasant habit of running WordBasic macros without warning you, so the typical macro virus could not spread through it but could still execute inside it.

Word Viewer 97 arrived with Word 97 and could render a document inside Internet Explorer 3, which tells you what the web looked like at the time. Word Viewer 2003 came on 15 December 2004 and was the first version Microsoft bothered to patch. Service Pack 3 landed on 26 September 2007 and was the last version there ever was.

The license is the part worth reading. You were permitted to install it only to view and screen print documents made with Office software, and for no other purpose at all. You could pass it on to somebody else only alongside a file it was meant to open. Microsoft was giving away a reader and still fencing it in with terms, because the reader existed to protect the format rather than to help you.

On 29 November 2016 a post went up on the Office sustained engineering blog saying the viewer would be retired in November 2017. After that date there would be no download and no security updates. It was a few lines and a bulleted list of things to use instead.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually opened ~

The format list was wider than the name suggested. Alongside binary.doc it read RTF and plain text. It handled HTML and MHTML, and the XML format Word 2003 wrote. It also opened WordPerfect 5.x and 6.x files and Microsoft Works documents, which made it a free translation layer between the word processors people were stuck with in the nineties.

On 6 November 2006 Microsoft released the compatibility pack for the new Office file formats, and with that installed the viewer could handle.docx and.docm too. A free 2003-era reader was now opening files written by a suite that had not shipped yet. That one download extended its useful life by about a decade.

~ the long tail ~

Retirement in November 2017 did not stop the patches. Word Viewer shared code with Office 2003, and Office 2003 code shipped inside POSReady 2009, which was still under support. So security updates kept arriving for a product Microsoft had already buried, and the last one went out in the Patch Tuesday bundle of February 2019, fifteen months after the funeral.

What replaced it was not really a replacement. WordPad had been able to open.docx since Windows 7, and by 2017 anyone could drop a file into OneDrive and read it in a browser. The gap Word Viewer filled, a computer that could not open a document somebody had mailed you, stopped being a gap. Microsoft removed the download and almost nobody noticed, which is the correct ending for a utility that did its one job well enough that you forgot it was there.

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